The first stage of this integrated scheme will be rounded out in 1964. Both Hebe Haven and Plover Cove should be ready by 1970, though any completion dates beyond 1964 are likely to be elastic. At each stage, improvements are introduced and existing goals altered. In addition to these broad-scale developments, the colony has taken immediate measures to conserve the present supply of fresh water by making it possible to use salt water for such purposes as flushing and fire-fighting. Since 1958, salt-water mains have been installed in four densely populated sections of Kowloon and two on Hong Kong Island. Fluoridation of the entire water supply began in March, 1961. The possibility of distillation of seawater for producing a fresh-water supply has been examined by engineers, but thus far the outlook is discouraging; the cost remains far too high. There is even a faint, faraway hope that some day atomic energy may be employed to distill an unlimited supply of fresh water from the ocean at low cost. If every phase of Hong Kong’s integrated scheme is in operation by 1970, its water shortage may be over. Similarly, if all the reclamation projects now under consideration are brought to fulfillment in the next decade, there may be enough land to meet all ordinary requirements. The determination of these requirements, however, will derive from the Department of Public Works only secondarily. The primary determinant will come from the Registry of Marriages. Any recent visitor to the Central Marriage Registry would appreciate the difficulties in predicting the population of Hong Kong even five years hence; there the walls of two long corridors are so thickly papered with overlapping notices of marriage that not much more than the names and occupations of the prospective couples remain visible. Neither land nor water is likely to become a surplus commodity in tomorrow’s Hong Kong. CHAPTER SIX A New Day for Farms and Fisheries “On our small and peculiar land area, it would be impossible to reach a high order of self-sufficiency in food production.”—W. J. BLACKIE, former Hong Kong Director of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry For more than a thousand years men have wrested a precarious living from the farms and fishing grounds of the New Territories, yet they remained outside the economic and social orbit of Hong Kong until a few months after World War II. Politically, the New Territories had been part of the British crown colony since 1898. Nevertheless, the people of this scrambled-egg land mass and the 235 islands around it had held their interest in its British rulers to the legal minimum. The British themselves, passing through the New Territories on their way to the Fanling golf course or the Chinese border, viewed the region and its people with the fixed indifference of a New York commuter rolling over the swampy monotony of the Jersey meadows.